KDDI to Sell Sony Ericsson’s Walkman Cell Phone in Japan

4:30 pm on May 22, 2006 | Category: Business, Cell Phones, Mobile Devices, Multimedia

mobile3.jpg

Japan’s second largest wireless carrier, KDDI Corp., announced on Monday that it is launching Sony Ericsson’s Walkman-branded cell phone for the first time in the Japanese market.

Launching the highly popular line of advanced music handsets sent KDDI stock up yesterday, and is expected to help the company’s chances to withstand the saturated market’s increasing competition. This announcement also steals the thunder of leading rival, NTT DoCoMo, which revealed earlier this month that is plans to offer wireless music downloads by the end of this year.

The first Walkman phone to reach Japanese customers will be the W42S, which has an expected retail price of around ¥20,000 (US$179). It will feature 1 gigabyte of storage space, allowing the device to hold up to 630 songs at a time.

“More than 5.5 million Walkman phones have sold worldwide since their launch last August,” explained Sony Ericsson’s corporate VP, Hirokazu Ishizuka, at a news conference. He then proceeded to go a little over the top, claiming that “music phones virtually mean Walkman phones.”

KDDI’s launch of the Walkman handset could be some interesting competition for SoftBank, which is reportedly working with Apple on an iTunes-enabled cell phone for the Japanese market.

Related Articles:

    None Found

    No Comments yet »

    RSS feed for comments on this post.

    Leave a comment

    XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>


    Published by TeleClick Enterprises
    Edited by Jeremy Maddock